


When the Cold Comes

by Linden



Series: Pockets [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 01:29:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4941466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean had gotten himself out onto the front steps, a trail of blood and vomit smeared behind him, when he realized that the two blocks to the hospital were gonna be two blocks too far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is hijacked from Peter Bradley Adams' utterly [gorgeous song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGeYObWXgGU) of the same name.
> 
> There are not, to my knowledge, any service tunnels below the basement of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, but there is one hell of a statue of Lucifer and Michael in its gardens.
> 
> I am pretending, per [FrancesHouseman](http://archiveofourown.org/users/FrancesHouseman/pseuds/FrancesHouseman)'s excellent suggestion, that this tale ends with Sam tying his brother up in the car and bringing him back with him to California. Just so we're all clear on that.

**December 2003**

Dean had gotten himself out onto the front steps, a trail of blood and vomit smeared behind him, when he realized that the two blocks to the hospital were gonna be two blocks too far.

It had sounded like an easy job, it really had: just a gremlin in the service tunnels below the basement of St. John’s, nothing they hadn’t handled before in a dozen different places, nothing Dean couldn’t handle alone.  He hadn’t been worried when his dad had handed off the case to him; hell, he’d been  _proud_ , glad that John was starting to treat him like a real partner, like someone who could be trusted to keep his shit together and get the job done, even without Dad or Jim or Caleb at his back.

And the bitch of it was, he’d  _kept_  his shit together; he absolutely had—had gotten the job done even when the gremlin Grey had promised them turned out not to be a gremlin at all, but a seven-foot needle-clawed nightmare that had slammed into him like a goddamn linebacker in the dark; had gotten the job done even though by the time he’d managed to kill the son-of-a-bitch, he’d had to drag himself out of its lair and up the stairs and through the silent church on his hands and knees, unable to get to his feet, unable to get a full _breath,_ with the dark all around and pillars as tall as trees on either side.  So yeah, he’d gotten the job done, all right, but things were . . . they were not going so well, here on the front steps of the cathedral.  He was nauseous and sweating and cold all at once, and there was something heavy and wet and hurting (Jesus fuck was it hurting) inside his chest, just behind the bright hot shocks of pain that were his broken ribs and breastbone.  He had a terrible suspicion that it was his heart.

The thought struck him with a curious sort of calm, here in the dark, here in the snow, as he half-slumped, half-crumpled against the great door and heard it lock behind him: _I’m going to die._

His cell was still in his pocket.  It took him twenty precious seconds to get his hands working well enough to fish it out and turn it on, fingers slippery with his own blood, and he wasted another ten staring at the tiny screen.  The average response time in Manhattan for a critical 911 call was seven minutes.  Dean had no illusions that he was still going to be breathing in seven minutes; he had no illusions that he was going to be conscious in two, and he didn’t—some stranger’s voice, that wasn’t what he wanted the last thing he heard to be, wasn’t what he wanted to follow him into the dark.  Clumsy with cold and with blood loss and with the pain that was threatening to drown him now in its steady, rising tide, he thumbed through his contacts for the number of Sam’s landline, cadged three months ago from an unwary secretary in Stanford’s housing office.  He could hear a phone start ringing three thousand miles away, somewhere in warmth and gentle darkness, somewhere that didn’t smell like snow and wet asphalt and blood.    _Pick up,_   _Sammy_ , he thought, desperately.  _Be home, be awake, and pick up the phone, baby brother, c’mon, please, just this once; you don’t know it’s me; pick up the—_

‘Hello?’ said a tired, painfully familiar voice, and Dean’s badly battered heart thumped, once, hard, inside his chest. It had been more than a year since he’d heard his brother’s living voice (478 days, if he were being precise, and yeah, fine, he’d been counting, whatever), and for a moment he couldn’t find his own, locked up as it suddenly was beneath the knot of grief and worry and love and wanting in his throat.   _Sam.  Sammy_.

 ‘ . . . hel _lo_?’ Sam said again, impatiently this time.  Then: ‘For fuck’s sake, Abe, if this is y—’

‘Sammy don’t hang up,’ Dean got out, finally.  ‘Please don’t hang up.’

‘ . . . Dean?’

The wariness Dean could hear in his voice should have hurt, it really should have, but he was too glad to hear his name on his brother’s tongue to care.   _Sammy.  Sammy.  Sam._

‘Hey, kiddo,’ he managed.

‘What are you—how did you even get this  _number_?’

He almost smiled, because he could see the bitch-face that went along with that particular tone of voice as clearly as if Sammy were beside him: #7, always a classic.  ‘Man can’t call his little brother to say hi?’ It was hard to talk, but he was pretty sure that his words had come out clearly—a little slurred, maybe, but clear enough, all the same.

‘Jesus, are you drunk?’ Sam demanded, and okay, fine, maybe the slur was more than just a little, whatever.  Still nothing he couldn’t work with.

‘. . . yeah,’ he said after a couple of beats, ‘cause that was the easiest way to play this, sure.  ‘Yeah, Sammy; ’m sorry; I just . . . I jus’ wanted to . . .’ He turned his head, once, to cough, wet and red, hoped the sound of it didn’t carry well over the phone. ‘ . . . to hear your voice for a minute, ‘s all.’  He tipped his head back against the bronze door behind him, trying to pull in a breath.  There was a sharp stabbing pain in the right side of his chest now, spreading to his shoulder and his back, an unwelcome accompaniment to the deep crushing ache on the left; he was fairly certain his fucking lung had collapsed.  ‘Don’t be mad, okay?’  he managed.

Silence for a moment.  Then: ‘Dean?’  Sam said again.  The bitchiness was fading, leaving him sounding young and uncertain.  ‘Dean, what—are you hurt?  What’s wrong?’

‘Nothin,’ he said, and he thought his voice still sounded okay, thought it sounded mostly steady.  ‘Nothin’, little brother, just, uh . . .’  Holy shit, his chest hurt.  ‘Listen, I’m gonna let you go; I just—’

‘Where—you’re hurt, aren’t you.  You’re hurt; I can hear it in your—did you call someone? Tell me you called someone, man.’

A ghost of a smile touched his mouth, though he was having trouble feeling it.  ‘Geeky little brother told me once it takes—’ He pulled in a hissing, shallow breath. ‘—takes seven minutes to get a hospital bus around here,’ he said.  ‘I just—I wanted to talk to you, kiddo, just for a minute, I—’                                                       

‘Dean, Jesus, put Dad on the phone, okay?  Just put him on the phone, just for a minute, or put me on speaker; just—’

He was so cold, and tired, and the pain was bad now; it was very bad.  But the snow was pretty, the way it was falling, white heavy drifts through the beams of the streetlights.  Sammy should see it; Sammy had always loved the snow. Sammy was eleven, chubby and sweet-faced and trying so hard to tackle him into a snow drift in Michigan, face flushed, eyes shining, night sky purple overhead and snow coming down all around them.

‘—ean!  Dean, shit _, answer me_.  Is Dad there?  Where are you?’

He blinked himself back to the present, swallowed.  Tasted blood.  ‘New York,’ he said, and his voice didn’t sound okay anymore; it didn’t sound okay at all.  ‘’M in New York, Sammy.  Dad’s not . . . he’s not here.’

‘Where in New York.’  There was something tight in his voice now, something frightened, and that wasn’t okay; that wasn’t okay at all.  Dean hadn’t meant to scare him; he’d just wanted—‘Dean, you tell me where you are, right the fuck now.’

‘I, uh . . . steps,’ he said, ‘outside, by the . . . the doors,’ because he was pretty sure that’s where he was, was pretty sure that the hard smooth thing at his back was one of the front doors to the—the place.  There was a car coming down the street, headlights on, wipers beating against the snow; it went past without ever pausing.  ‘There’s a—it’s the . . . you remember that—that giant church you loved here as a kid?’

‘Okay.’  Sam’s sudden rush of relief was palpable, three thousand miles away.  ‘Dean, Jesus, okay, good, you’re at St. John’s, man, yeah?  You’re outside of St. John’s?  You’re only like two blocks from a hospital; you just gotta—’

‘Yeah, I’m not gonna make it that far, kiddo.’  There was black creeping in on the edges of his vision, and someone was crushing his chest in a vice.  ‘Sammy, look, I—I—’                                                

‘Don’t you dare,’ Sam said, fiercely.  ‘Don’t you fucking dare, Dean.  You stay on the phone, you hear me?  You  _stay the fuck awake_  and you keep talking to me.  Just—just give me one minute, okay?  One minute, Dean.  Stay awake.  Talk to me, all right?  Tell me something; come on.’ 

Dean couldn’t get too worked up about trying to stay awake; he wasn’t gonna be able to stay  _alive_.  But that was all right; that was okay; he wasn’t gonna tell Sammy, didn’t want him to worry.  There was a quick, hollow clicking sound coming over the phone now; it took him a moment to recognize it as Sammy typing, frantic, fast.  Dean could see him, almost, phone tucked between his ear and shoulder, long fingers flying across a keyboard.  Wondered how long his hair was these days, all that soft rich silk, wondered whether the California sun had lightened it to the auburn it had been when Sam had been a little boy.  He hoped so.  He liked thinking of him like that, drenched in sunlight, safe from the dark.  ‘—gonna have someone call the ER at the hospital, okay?’ Sammy was saying, and he realized that the clicking had stopped.  ‘I got their number and I’m gonna have someone call and they’re gonna come get you, De; you just gotta stay—Brady call this number right now,’ he said, and his voice was suddenly muffled, as though he’d turned his head from the mouthpiece.  ‘Tell them there’s a critically wounded man on the steps of St. John’s, twenty-four years old, AB negative, and they  _need to go get him_ , because an ambulance won’t get there in time.  St.John’s, twenty-four, AB negative.  Hurry.  Dean?  Dean I’m right here, okay?  You gotta stay awake for me, man.  Just stay awake.’

It was getting harder to keep his eyes open, harder to breathe.  The left side of his face was freezing; it took him a moment to realize he’d slid sideways down the door, was lying now with his cheek pressed against the snowy stones, blood in his mouth, blood on the snow.  He could see his phone, from where it had slipped from his hand as he’d fallen, couldn’t get his arm to work well enough to reach for it.  He blinked, once, slow, snowflakes clinging to his lashes.  He was cold.  It was winter, he was sure of that, but he thought he heard the hum of crickets, somehow, thought he heard Sammy’s voice, far away, high and sweet like it hadn’t been for years, chirping,  _Got your lighter?_ , thought he smelled, for half a heartbeat, the bite of mint and pine and long wild grass in a summer night.

‘Dean, please.’  Sam’s voice, here, tinny through the phone’s speaker, thick with tears.  ‘Answer me.  Dean!’

 _I love you,_  he tried to tell him _,_ but his eyes were closing, and there were fireworks somewhere in the dark.


	2. Chapter 2

(Dean never saw the cloud of black that poured into a homeless boy in a nearby alley a moment later, never saw the kid-who-was-not-a-kid come shuffling up the stairs, wrapped in rags and a battered winter coat two sizes too big.  His eyes were gold, his eyes were  _glowing_ , and his smile was as bright as edged metal, as cold as the snow.  Crouching down, he put a hand over Dean’s torn heart, felt it thumping weakly, so weakly, slowing down.  His breath had already stopped.

Sam was his favorite, always had been, but Dean had his uses, and it wasn’t time yet for him to die.

‘Well,’ he murmured, breath stinking of sulfur, ‘today’s your lucky day, kid,’ and then there was nothing but light.)


	3. Chapter 3

He woke, once, to the mule-kick of electricity shocking through him and a cacophony of voices all around, but he was gone again before he could open his eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean opened his eyes to the green glow of a clock beside him ( _2:37 AM_ ), in a room he didn’t know. 

This state of affairs was not, at first blush, all that worrisome, or even strange: he almost never knew where in the hell he was when he first woke, a symptom of sleeping for twenty-some-odd years in beds that had never been his own.   _Motel room,_  was his first thought, muzzy, as he tried to remember what town he might be in, or at least what state, and then the smell hit him, cold and sharp and antiseptic ( _hospital why am I_   _in a hos_ —), and memory flooded in on a jagged tide of churches and claws and blood and Sammy’s voice and snow and pain. 

. . .  _fuck_.

He lay quietly for a moment, taking stock: he was thirsty and nauseated and a little bit dizzy, and he had a monitor clamped on one finger and an IV line in the back of his other hand and a chest tube high on his right side, and there was an oxygen mask over the lower part of his face.  He could feel the throb of what felt like two cracked ribs on the right ( _fuck_ ) and a broken breastbone ( _double fuck_ ), and the stinging itch of stitches ( _staples? no, stitches_ ) raking crosswise across his ribs, and also the generalized bone-deep  _pain_  that came from having had your guts damn near torn open and puddled around your shoes.  But from what Dean could remember of the son-of-a-bitch that had come after him below the basement of the church, and the blood trail he’d left crawling out of it, and the excruciating pressure that had been crushing his chest before he’d blacked out in the snow, broken bones and stitches and a chest tube were—they weren’t all that bad, actually.

He forced his eyes to stay open, though there wasn’t much to see. He had no roommate (oh, fuck, was he in a step-down unit? He was in a step-down unit, wasn’t he.), and the door was half-closed, with light and quiet night-noise from the hall spilling gently in.  A chair with a blanket thrown messily over its back was tucked in right beside his bed, and a discman and a battered black watch were on the small rolling table on the other—

His heart stuttered, and seriously, Dean was pretty sure it was in no condition to take that kind of stress.  

He blinked, thought for a moment that he was dreaming, and the next that he was hallucinating, but no, seriously, that was—he knew that watch.  He’d  _bought_  that watch—had actually bought it, had hustled pool for three nights running and then gone to an actual sporting store in an actual mall and picked it out from an actual glass case and everything, because he’d wanted to give Sammy something for his birthday that wasn’t a gun or a knife or a skin mag from the nearest gas mart, had just wanted to make him smile, his little brother who’d been so angry with the world.  But how the hell was it—

There was the quiet squeak of footfalls in the corridor, and then, a moment later, a sasquatch was coming quietly in from the hall, huddled into Dad’s leather jacket like it was armor and comfort both and holding a Styrofoam cup in one hand.  The sudden pain in Dean’s chest had nothing to do with his wounds.   _Sammy_.  The kid looked like seven kinds of hell, with shadows beneath his eyes and three days’ worth of stubble on his jaw, and his hair was a messy, unwashed halo around his pretty face, but he was still  _Sam_ , Jesus, still long-boned and shaggy-haired, with thicker arms and broader shoulders than Dean remembered but a mouth that looked just as sweet, and wide eyes that were looking at him as though he were the only thing in the world.

He swallowed.  He breathed.  He tugged his mask free so that he could speak.  ‘ . . . that had better be coffee,’ he finally managed, voice rough with sleep and something he refused to let himself name.  ‘And it had better be for me.’ 

***

It wasn’t for him. 

Also, Sam refused to go get him a cheeseburger.

***

 A nurse had to come in and poke him and ask him questions and put his mask back on and shine a really fucking annoying light in his face and do Things to his monitors and then go out again (and also deny him a cheeseburger) before Sammy filled him in on what had happened while he’d been out: surgery to deal with a smorgasbord of traumatic chest injuries—he’d figured that—a frantic phone call to Bobby, and an air ambulance out of New York as soon as he’d been stable enough, post-op, for transport.  Sam didn’t know all the details of that last bit, only that Jim Murphy had called his old sergeant, now a trader at Goldman-Sachs, who had paid, gladly, for Dean to be airlifted to Sanford Medical in Sioux Falls.

(Dean was pretty glad the drugs had kept him under for that:  Sammy didn’t know that he was afraid to fly.)

To the tally of hurts he’d made upon waking, he could add catastrophic blood loss and the fact that he was no longer in possession of a spleen.  To his surgeons’ considerable surprise, given the damage to his sternum, his heart had been unhurt.

He dozed for a little while afterward, and woke to find Sam asleep, slumped over with his arms crossed on the bed near Dean’s hip, his dark head pillowed on top of them.  Dean slid a hand into his hair and left it there, fingers stroking gently against his scalp, for a long, long while.

***

 He got a look at his ribs, later, rucking up his super-classy hospital gown to see.

 Figured the fucker would’ve had six claws instead of five. 

***

 He and Sammy didn’t talk much, Stanford and hunting and their father still sitting like a live minefield between them.

But the kid was there every time Dean opened his eyes after dozing (and Christ on a crutch, he could not stay awake); and he got him a piece of pie from the cafeteria when lunch came with nothing but a freakin’ Jello cup for dessert; and each time the nurses came in to roust him out of bed, it was Sam who walked with him, up and down the long wide hall.

Dean let him push his IV pole once, which was almost, you know, like driving. 

And when, later, he woke from a nightmare of snow and blood and crushing pain in his chest ( _it had been his heart; he knew it had been his heart; what the hell had happ—_ ), Sammy was asleep in the chair beside him, leather jacket pulled around him like a blanket, hand tucked through the bedrail to rest beside Dean's, their pinkies hooked together, and Dean lay for a long while watching the light from the hallway fall across his face.

***

Dean checked himself out two days later, with his sternum wired into place and one hundred seventeen stitches across his chest and ribs, his AMA discharge form in his pocket, painkillers in another, and one seriously brassed-off doc in his wake.  (He was honestly pretty sure that doctors weren’t supposed to use words like ‘dumbass’ when talking to their patients, because surely the hippopot—hippogri—damn doctor oath that started with hippo had something to say about that.)  He was in a set of Sammy’s clothes—jeans that were a little long in his legs and a button-down that was a little tight through his shoulders, and a worn hoodie that was soft and warm and smelled like his brother—and he was refusing to admit, even to himself, the comfort that it gave him.

They were halfway to Bobby’s, heat cranked up, radio on low, when Dean finally asked. 

‘Sammy, you call Dad?’

Sam kept his eyes on the road, and his hands at ten and two.  ‘Bobby did,’ he said, quietly.  And then: ‘He didn’t pick up.’

Dean didn’t ask if their father had bothered to call back.

The sky was heavy, promising snow.

***

They got to the scrapyard to find Christmas lights twinkling in the windows and Bobby frying up bacon cheeseburgers for dinner in his Kiss the Cook apron, with Ore-Ida golden-crinkle fries just coming out of the oven and a pie box on the counter.  Dean’s favorite beer was on the table and there was a bowl of the home-made ketchup he’d always loved beside the salt, and Dean was hit in the chest with so unexpected a sense of  _home_  and  _welcome_  and  _wanted_  that he had to blink, hard, against the sudden water welling in his eyes.  He told himself that it was just from the cold, just from the bite of the bitter wind outside; it  _was_ , had to be, because the last time he’d checked he still had a dick and both his balls and so had not morphed into a giant girl.

‘Well, you boys look like shit,’ Bobby greeted them, with his usual gentle tact and tenderness, as Cohen came bounding up to frisk around their legs and Sam closed the door against the wind at their backs.  Dean scrubbed a hand across his face and got ahold of himself.  He looked up to find Bobby watching him with narrow eyes; their grumpiness did nothing to disguise the affection in his face.  He pointed a spatula at him.  ‘And you and I are gonna be havin’ a conversation about  _back-up_  and  _reliable intel_  soon as you don’t look like a stiff breeze would knock you over; don’t you think we won’t.  Food’ll be up in a couple of minutes.  You all right to sit?’

Dean was absolutely all right to sit.  Dean needed another painkiller and also a new ribcage, but he would have been all right to hop up on the table and do a hokey-pokey, if it meant he got within five feet of a cold Guinness and a cheeseburger.

They ate an early supper there in the kitchen, the three of them, lamps burning bright against the falling dark, Bobby’s police radio on low in the back, the sound of a storm rising on the grasslands outside.  Dean, who was no better proof against actual puppy-dog eyes than he was against Sam’s, lost half his fries to Cohen, but that was pretty much all right. 


	5. Chapter 5

He woke sometime later, utterly unaware that he’d fallen asleep.  The last thing he remembered was settling into Bobby’s recliner to watch the news, Bobby working the phones in the kitchen and Sam leaving for a Walmart run ( _Dean, dude, you already have pie_), but the room was quiet now, and very dim—TV off, only embers in the hearth.  There was a soft sheet and a puffy down blanket tucked in close around him, smelling like detergent and the faint lavender-and-pine of Bobby’s linen closet upstairs, and someone (Sammy) had undone his belt and the top button of his jeans, had tugged off his boots and tucked his feet into warm thick socks.  His broken breastbone was singing like a bitch and his stitches were itchy as hell and he _hurt_ , all over, just sort of generally, but he was also warm like he hadn’t been in days, and he was behind three layers of wards in the closest thing he had to home, and his brother was here, Sam was right here, asleep on the couch beside him beneath one of Karen’s beautiful old quilts, messy hair in his face, soft mouth slack with sleep.

 _Sammy_ , he thought, still half-asleep, reaching for him before he remembered his ribs; the jolt of white-hot pain that arced through him snapped him all the way awake.  He sat quietly for a minute, breath unsteady, eyes on his baby brother.   An ache that had nothing to do with his body was waking in his chest.  Time blurred on him, just a little, just for a moment, and for those few heartbeats Sam was three and seven and twelve and sixteen and nineteen and twenty all at once, a half dozen incarnations of the boy he’d woken beside thousands of times in the dark, and all Dean wanted was to wrap any one of them up in his arms and tug him in close: the little kid who’d refused to go to sleep unless he were wound around Dean like a baby monkey; the boy who’d curled tiredly into his side in the backseat of the Impala; the teenager who’d slept naked and easy in his arms; the man lying three feet away now in the dark—Dean didn’t care which, he really didn’t; he just wanted _Sam_.

He moved, carefully, before he did something stupid, easing the recliner upright, levering himself to his feet, biting back a curse at the pain.  He hadn’t taken more than two steps when Sam snaked a long arm out and caught him by the hem of his hoodie, fingers tangling in the soft cotton like the two of them were six and ten again, Sam forever piping _don’t go, Dean,_ and _c’n I come too, Dean?_ and _Dean_ and _Dean_ and _Dean_.  ‘Where you goin’?’ he murmured now, only half-awake. 

‘Gotta move a little,’ Dean replied, pulling the sweatshirt free from his brother’s grip. Sam latched firmly onto him instead, long beautiful fingers sliding beneath the cuff of his sleeve and wrapping easily around his wrist; Dean gave a half-hearted tug to free himself, not really wanting to give up the feel of his brother against his skin.   ‘C’mon, Clingy. Lemme go.’

Sam opened his eyes to look up at him, soft sleepy gaze sharpening into wakefulness as he spoke. ‘You okay?’

‘M gonna be better if you let me go.  I gotta piss, Sam,’ he said, 'cause hey, lying and avoidance had never hurt anyone, really.

Sam held him for a heartbeat longer, thumb stroking absently back and forth against the soft skin of his inner wrist, before he loosened his grip enough for Dean to pull free. By the time Dean had hidden in the bathroom for a minute or two and washed his hands and splashed some water on his face, he was light-headed and a little weak in his knees, and it hurt like fuck to pull a full breath. _Demerol,_ he thought, wearily, gripping the edge of the sink as he studied himself for a moment in the mirror. He avoided his reflection these days, as a general rule, but he needed to be sure he had his expression in order, needed to be sure Sam couldn't read the bone-deep, heart-deep loneliness and longing on his face. _Just get some Demerol and tell the kid good night and get back in the goddamned chair, Winchester; that's all you have to do. Thirty seconds. You can handle thirty fuckin' seconds._

Sammy was in the kitchen when he came out, filling a glass at the sink, Dean’s med bottle already in his other hand, and Dean stood quietly for a minute at the counter, watching him.  His little brother was easier in his body than he’d been the last time Dean had seen him, the coltish clumsiness that had come with his last growth spurt, that had fucked with his aim and his range and his ability to freakin’ _walk_ when he was nineteen, swallowed up now by the same coiled easy grace he’d had as a boy, and even in Bobby’s kitchen at two in the morning, in sweats and an old soft tee with his hair mussed all to hell, he was still the most beautiful thing Dean knew.

He wondered, with a sharp, sudden pang, whether there were anyone else who got to see his little brother like this now, sleep-warm and barefoot and disheveled, whether there were anyone who was used to waking to the warmth of his octopus-limbs wrapped around them and the soft silk of his hair against their throat. There was, he imagined painfully; there had to be: no one got into Stanford by being stupid, and he didn't see how anyone with even half a brain could keep from loving Sam.

‘Hey,’ Sam said, softly, and he blinked to find his little brother in front of him, holding two pain pills to his bruised lips.  ‘Dean, here.’

 _I got it_ , he wanted to say, and _I’m not four, for fuck’s sake_, but all the world seemed warm and dim and full of nothing but Sam and the dark and the sound of the wind, and he was still so fucking _tired_ , and so he just opened his mouth and let his brother tuck the pills inside, just swallowed them down along with the taste of salt on his brother's skin and the water the kid lifted to his lips a second later, cold from the winter tap. Sammy put the glass down beside them on the counter, didn't move away. He was standing close enough that Dean could smell the sharp bite of soap from his shower earlier that evening, could feel the heat coming off his warm skin, and as he shuffled a little closer still, ducking his shaggy head like a little boy, Dean didn’t—Jesus, he _did not_ —mean to lean into him the way he did, but he was dizzy and hurt and no longer entirely sure he was even awake, and Sam was here and warm and . . . and _Sam_ , and the feel of the kid’s arms winding carefully around his own hurt body was everything he’d wanted and missed and needed since he'd watched his baby brother walk away from him down a midnight road in Iowa.

He could feel Sam's heartbeat against his sore ribs, too quick, could feel his breath hitching soft and damp and unsteady, just below his ear.

 _I gotcha, kiddo,_ he thought, bringing a hand up to cup the back of his head even though it hurt like a bitch to raise his arm, and "I got you," Sam whispered, tucking him in close against his chest, so freakin' tall now, Jesus, but still the little brother that Dean knew, still the Sammy he remembered. Warmth settled in his chest and spread, easy and slow.

Sam tucked his cheek against his, fisted slim strong hands in the back of Dean's sweatshirt. 'Dean,' he whispered, and they stood, wrapped around one another in Bobby’s kitchen, as the night winds rose and rose and rose outside.


End file.
